Sabrina said:
:: What does the Bible say? That this God wiped out entire communities of people to allow the Israelites to take over their land. That this God was perfectly happy to hear the Psalmist write words encouraging Israelites to kill their enemies' babies. That this God often encouraged the Israelites to kill all the males and nonvirgin females of their enemies, and steal the young virgins. That this God is petty, jealous and often acts in a way that, if a human did the same things, he'd be viewed as a horrible criminal.
: Provide the quotes and the context please.
You already know this stuff, Sabrina. Nevertheless, I'll do your homework for you. Let's take my claims one by one and I'll show you a Biblical example that illustrates it.
:: That this God wiped out entire communities of people to allow the Israelites to take over their land.
Joshua 6: Shortly after their entering the promised land, God tells the Israelites to kill all humans and animals in Jericho, but to save the silver and gold.
Joshua 8: Shortly after wiping out Jericho, God tells the Israelites to kill all the people of Ai, but to save the animals and other goods for themselves.
:: That this God was perfectly happy to hear the Psalmist write words encouraging Israelites to kill their enemies' babies.
Psalm 137:8, 9 (ESV); a lament on the Babylonian captivity: "O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"
:: That this God often encouraged the Israelites to kill all the males and nonvirgin females of their enemies, and steal the young virgins.
Numbers 31: God tells the Israelites to take vengeance on the Midianites who defended themselves from Israelite aggression by cunning; all except young virgins are killed.
:: That this God is petty, jealous and often acts in a way that, if a human did the same things, he'd be viewed as a horrible criminal.
Exodus 34:14: "You shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God."
Genesis 34: God tells Abraham to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice, to test Abraham's faith. A present day leader who told a parent to do anything remotely like that would be denounced as a monstrous criminal in the court of world opinion.
: You are not stupid. The context of much of what you are saying involves nation building.
I see. Nation building absolves God of blame for atrocities, but not men such as Ghengis Kahn, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Japanese leaders in WWII, and so forth.
Your ability to hold double standards is, well, Christian.
: If you are naively thinking that God has no right to give the land to whom he wants but mankind, on the other hand, can divide the land as he pleases then you are putting your head in an ostrich hole because it pleases you to do so.
I never said or implied anything of the kind.
: Grow up please.
Start thinking, please!
: If man can do as he pleases so can God.
Where did I say anything like that? I take it you believe that God's bad actions are justified by man's bad actions.
: This the most stupidist thing on the net, this stupidity of: "why does God war? why does God kill?" lol wake up man. We kill, so does God! This is a no brainer!
Yes indeed! Man kills and God kills. A no-brainer it is! And since this warring species called Man invented God in his image, it's entirely logical.
But that's not the point. The point is whether it's proper for man or God to be engaging in the kind of wholesale slaughter of innocents that the Bible says God instigated.
:: Just look at the misery in the world. Does this Biblical God do anything about it? No. Any human who had the power to stop such misery and refused would be seen as a monster. Excusing God by saying, "He must have his reasons" answers nothing.
: If mankind really, now really, wanted to eradicate hunger could he? How about war? Preventable diseases? Child abuse? Child sex trade?
Probably, if an incredibly powerful dictator managed to take over the entire world. Of course, he'd have to do a lot of killing to stop wicked people from continuing their depredations.
But again you're comparing man to God and judging that God should be held to low human standards.
: Please, don't give me this whining bit that God should fix what we ourselves refuse to fix.
What do you propose as a fix that "we" should implement?
: Either we are intelligent beings or we are chimps. Of the two, man has much less right to complain!
My, my. Such unassailable logic!
:: Sabrina, dear, you must learn to argue logically and stop emoting. I said nothing about anything beyond the universe.
: AlanF, dear, you must learn the art of hyperbole. The purpose of the hyperbole was to point out that you (please sit down before reading this), do not know everything!
Whoa! Sha-zay-um! I didn't know that.
:: Obviously you object to my statement. The only effective way to contradict it is to give some examples of how you think the universe functions as if the Christian God does exist. But I don't think you can find any.
: The universe functions according to the laws of physics and I am very sure other laws which have yet to be discovered.
Laws that contain not one whit of evidence that God sustains them.
I asked for examples, Sabrina. Obviously you don't know of any.
: I am open to discovery, you are not.
Who says? That paragon of logical analysis, you?
: The very nature and essence of a "law" is in itself a declaration of a maker of that law.
You obviously have no idea what a physical law is. Let me enlighten you with some wisdom from a lecture given by Bertrand Russell (from Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, pp. 7-8, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1957):
There is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that.
On this business of God's permitting a great deal of misery, I haven't even yet touched on things that even you, Sabrina, can't blame on "man". Ever watch a Discovery Channel presentation about African life? People have a fascination with the scenes of predation presented. Ever watch how lions kill elephants? It can take 4-5 hours for the lions to chew the poor elephant to death. I'm sure the elephant experiences massive pain during this long-drawn-out process. Have you ever seen a video of Orcas killing a Blue Whale by ripping out its tongue and then ripping open its side, then leaving the whale to bleed to death? You can see such a video at the San Diego zoo. How about footage of Komodo Dragons killing prey? They take a quick bite at a deer, pig or buffalo, then wait a week or so for the bacterial cocktail in their saliva to cause the poor victim to die of septicemia. Do you know how painful a death from septicemia is? How about the hyenas and African wild dogs and lions that literally begin eating their prey before it's even dead? And all of this has been going on, in one form or another, since the beginning of macroscopic life more than half a billion years ago.
And then we have the many sorts of natural disasters that kill a great many people. God certainly has the power to stop such things, but he doesn't. Why not? The fact that he doesn't demonstrates that he doesn't care.
All of the above is, to me, positive proof that the Christian God is simply not there.
AlanF